But what exactly is a lead FX artist we hear you ask. It’s a legitimate question, and one that Keith was more than willing to answer. “Well an effects artist in the games industry right now is in charge of basically pushing all the technology to do these massive set pieces that we’re trying to pull off in Uncharted," he rattles off excitedly. "So we’re almost like the scene finishers, where we go through and in the case where we have a hallway that’s flooding with water, we need to sit down and figure out how to do all that. How to build the technology that can actually support this, and we’re also the ones that end up using the technology and creating the art for it."
It’s a detailed explanation, but even after a few minutes, it was easy to see the passion in the man. “At the base, our job is providing life to the environments and doing the particular effects that require beats. So there’s things like a grenade explosion needs to feel good, when you shoot somebody, or when you shoot a wall it needs to have a realistic feel. More than visual impact, it’s gotta have a feel to it so that the player’s rewarded. So the baseline of my job is doing all the explosions, the fire, the rains, the weathers, the winds, the gunshots, the tracers, the smoke, the blood – just putting life and motion into things."
Yep, this all took two years.
"The bigger part of my job and my department’s job, especially with this game is to push technologies, because we’re trying to do a lot of really cool things, and a lot of the solutions we have come up with have been things that the game industry hasn't really tackled before.”
With a big statement like that, we had to know more. Sure the Uncharted series is transforming into a technical marvel with each sequel, but what are these ‘experiments?’ Guerrette doesn't hesitate for a second.
“Well the water. We actually put in a fully dynamic ocean in the game, which is one huge challenge, and then on top of that we said we want to have this fully dynamic ocean in the game that the entire level’s attached to, so the cruise ship is actually attached to this ocean simulation. It’s not something we controlled, it’s something we literally put some parameters in and said ok, go at it and see what happens.”
Anyone who has already played the game is amazed by what Keith's team have created, but as we conversed, we quickly learned it was an even more arduous task then anyone initially envisaged. A whopping two years of development for example was spent dedicated to the widely publicised, ocean based scene many have already seen.
“It wasn’t just about getting the level to attach to it properly,” Keith explains, “But also giving us the controls we need, because in the end the tech doesn’t matter, it’s all about the game. So the designers had to have the ability to tone down the ocean in areas they wanted it to be a little more subtle and flat or crank it up where they want waves crashing over the boat. I mean it’s just been a bunch of crazy steps along the way, and honestly a really strong emotional ride. Because when you start off with that task, when we first decided we wanted to do this, we were looking at each other like how the hell are we gonna do that. And it’s just like depression because we didn’t think we were good enough to do it and then it goes into frustration because we spent six months and dint get anywhere. Then at some point we sort of stumble into an answer and it turns into this crazy childish giddy excitement like a three year old on Christmas or something. It’s exciting.”
Cover fail #25.
With the Uncharted theme music blasting through the Opera House's studio hall we wondered if all these extra challenges stemmed from wanting to push on further from Uncharted 2’s achievements?
“In some ways. They're really two driving factors for naughty dog with these project, and one of them is we didn’t expect the success of Uncharted 2; we didn’t see it coming at all. We knew we had a good game, and we were proud of what we did, but we didn’t think it was going to be THAT big, so when we started to plan Uncharted 3 we were immediately like ok we have to go way way bigger. And so there was a whole lot of pressure around that, of just trying to do all kinds of crazy things to make sure that we really upped our game. But beyond that we’re just really passionate people, and we own all of our tasks, so when I sit down and I work on something, it’s mine, it’s my personal pride and energy is at stake with it so we always end up going above and beyond with it because we just get attached to it and because we are excited by it. At a certain point we almost stop thinking that we’re making a game for other people and that we’re making a game for ourselves and it’s kind of fascinating and it’s one of the coolest things about being out here."
Pressure is an increasing worry in the games industry, especially after high profile examples like Rockstar. So with the pressure of fans wanting the Naughty Dog team to surpass what they did with Uncharted 2, we asked just how heavy this pressure was within the game developer's offices.
“It was huge. You know at a certain point we had to stop and say like ok if we can’t beat that do we wanna do a third one. We don't want to ruin what we've done. We want to end on a high note. And of course we sat down and said no, we can do better. And that’s one of the really cool things about Naughty Dog is that we don't really have much of an ego internally. We’re very good at looking at what we’ve done and analysing what was good about this and what was bad about this. We’re very very aware of our failures, we’re very aware of the negatives of the genre we’ve chosen, but we’re also aware of the strengths of the genre we’ve chosen. So we spend a lot of time just sitting down and analysing what can we do better, and one of the big things is we had this technology from Uncharted 2 with the set pieces, with the ability to attach Nathan Drake to a level that’s moving through 3D space and to have drake play the correct animations and to have all of his physics, and all of the other objects that are physically bound to that object or that level move with it which is the train sequence and the collapsing building from Uncharted 2."
"We had that technology but we hadn't really used it because we spent all of Uncharted 2 making it. And so from the design side, the level side and the technology side we said ok we can do this now, let’s go to town with it. And you know at that time we were set, we thought we didn't have any more to do really as far as the tech goes, so we really tried throwing every crazy insane thing that we could do to Nathan Drake up on the whiteboard and just brainstorming everything."
Drake always had a habit of taking hide and seek too far.
Just how insane did it get? Well the answer may surprise you. "We even listed going to the moon; not that we were seriously going to do a story at any point, but it was up there just because yeah sure it’s a crazy idea. So that’s where things like having a plane explode while you’re flying in it kinda came up. And we sat down afterwards with that big list and we started figuring out which ones are realistically feasible, and then which ones might actually fit in the world and we went off and started working on them. And then we iterate really fast so at that point we wanted to make sure we weren't wasting a lot of time on a lot of different things so we tried everything basically and saw which ones worked, which ones didn't, which ones might actually have potential, what can we learn from the failures. You know when we’re making a game we don't know where we’re going with it, it’s a journey for us and any studio that says that they know what they’re doing, and they know exactly how to make a game, they're freaking liars. Every month we were working on this game we had no idea that we would end up here from last month."
But anyone who's played an Uncharted game is well aware that it's not all about the tech. Yes, it's the narrative that often takes centre stage and is the key element that attracts so many gamers to the series, and Guerrette agrees. "We also wanted to make sure we had a worthwhile story, because for us, the entire genre we’ve developed is a story drive video game and that’s our strength right now, and that’s what we want to do. We want to be storytellers, and that’s something that not a lot of other games in the industry are pushing and i feel as though it’s one of the areas that we have separated ourselves in. But it’s also what helps drive the franchise; i mean so many girlfriends love watching their boyfriends play our game because it is just an involved emotional story."
"So we took off and spent a long time digging around for what we can do with the story that would be fascinating right now. Where can we take this and what historical context can we tie into, and so we found the story of Lawrence of Arabia, TE Lawrence, and it peaked our interest because we thought to ourselves we want to go to the desert this time because we’ve done forest, we’ve done snow, we wanna go to the desert this time. So when we found the story of Lawrence of Arabia and started looking into it and realising the amount of holes and gaps in his tale that exist in real life, plus all the depth of what he did and you know there’s just so much for us to weave a fiction through.”
Check back tomorrow to find Part 2 of our interview with Keith as we discover just what he thinks of the Uncharted movie, what makes Uncharted so grand, and the wonderful world of 3D.
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